Oh yes, and then there are the references - in the UK at least - to 'collegiate-influenced mods': wearing the G9 etc.

It's no revelation many looks shame the same items, even the same beginnings, but with the of wanting to look contrary to everyone again, you pretty much being contrary to yourself too, from the comments you've made before. Like I said because something shares similar ingredients doesn't make it the same dish. The clothes, even some of the labels are still there, but the details and the cuts typically aren't.

Italian men do it all the while.

LOL!  But they and their French counterparts 'do Prep' in a sense: rather nicely.  We went into a cookwear shop in Britanny and the owner was wearing a buttondown and flat-fronted chinos as if it was the most natural thing in the world.  Black loafers and no socks.

All I'm really trying to say here - before Jimmy steps into the ring - is that the OPH, like 'Take Ivy' or even 'The Sloane Ranger's Handbook', is purely a 'construct'.  Furthermore, what brought it into being and what it spawned was also a 'construct'.  But there was - there must have been - a time when, on campuses and elsewhere, the clothes were (almost) 'just clothes'.  But clothes, as we know, are never 'just clothes': they contain coded information: signals: they are full of nuances.  'Beater' is a prime example of this: Adlai Stevenson, with that hole in his shoe; the confidence to be calm and quiet and not show off your Rolex/big car/D&G sunglasses/whatever.  JFK was probably just a little too 'charlie' in his presentation (in spite of what 'Esquire' found to say in his praise).  But - at certain times and in certain places - Americans will dazzle.

That wasn't a slip, or a typo, it was my online sean connery impression!

Who mentioned Trad?  Forget it.  I'm not talking about contemporary marketing strategies, either.  But, if you insist on doing so, how does Ralph Lauren fit into your scheme of things?  What was it?  What is it?  What has it become?  Is it still on offer at Chiltern Street?  Under what guise?  Lacoste is another example.  Do you look at each and every one of those photographs of DMR and see 'Ivy'?  I don't.  I see...  something sometimes aesthetically pleasing, sometimes something dubious...  I'm no longer quite content with the phrase 'Ivy League'.  It's become too convenient a label.

Oh, bollocks.  I'm just trying to be contextual/make some sense out of it.

No, I know.  But I see the roots as stretching back to at least before 1914.

Maybe.  But, when all's said and done, it's sure to come back to the post-Korean period, with all that rayon, Dacron and so on.  The democratization of The Look that many are so fanatical about, because of its 'boosting' nature.

Could someone sell me an old beaten up copy of that OPH?

Maybe I should take a look at it, finally...

before I waffle on endlessly about "preppy"...

Anyway, I've heard the word used in different contexts, too, from Salinger to Love Story, and from some of the things there, I suppose, that the problems with these word start with misunderstandings of this OPH, because its mock-prescriptive lighthearted tone was commonly misunderstood as prescriptive... and you end up with travesties, always in as much pink and green as possible, the permanently draped sweater and the permanently popped collar and the exaggerated layering of five different button down or polo/tennis shirts, lobster pants and all these preppy stereotypes and the pig ignorant fratboy conceit attached to the word....

If you go back in time, it was probably used synonymously with "Ivy", or maybe as a younger look, because of the reference to the prep schools and not to the universities? For the marketing ca. 1980, it might as well be used in this particular context, because the people attending these schools were even more privileged than the people who would be admitted to Ivy League universities, in other words, an elitism of privilege, instead of academical merit...


If you look at the clothes, and use the word only in reference to the actual garments, there are of course lots of intersecting sets and similarities...

It's the same and it's something completely differant!



It means different things in different contexts, both the words "Ivy" and "preppy"...

We can look at the

a. the texts using the words
b. the images with the texts
c. the actual clothes, the technical aspects of design and construction, colours, textures...

and we produce new texts about them.


What these words refer to is in the end something like

Ivy as

a. a marketing term
b. a historical term in menswear
c. a trade term
d. the clothes

or

a. a specifically East Coast American iteration of the natural shoulder style in tailoring
b. a marketing term used to sell these garments using the name of the elite schools
c. the style worn at these schools
d. the general marketing of this style in magazine fashion writing and nowadays in the blog world...

...and "Ivy" is certainly just a plant...

and preppy would be just as difficult....

Seriously, I don't want to get into poststructuralist language philosophy and French discourse theory...

Nevertheless, I think that we cannot ask what "Ivy" means or what "preppy" "means" "in general", and it is not about reading all the texts that we have as some "gospel", and we have to read the marketing texts for what they are...

We can only ask functional and genealogical questions in this context about the clothes, the actual garments, the images presenting them, and about the texts these images (from advertising, stills etc.) use, and we have to distinguish between these things carefully...

Oh, no... I'm waffling off again... Forget, what I wrote above....

In short: It certainly depends on what you mean with "preppie"...

Last edited by Hard Bop Hank (2012-02-09 05:19:55)